The public library is the latest place to pick up a coronavirus test. Librarians are overwhelmed.

 

Julie Zauzmer Weil, " The public library is the latest place to pick up a coronavirus test. Librarians are overwhelmed", Washington Post, Jan 18, 2022. https://www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/2022/01/18/librarians-coronavirus-tests-workers/

As public libraries in the District and across the nation have been pressed into service as coronavirus test distribution sites, librarians have become the latest front-line workers of the pandemic. Phones ring every few minutes with yet another call from someone asking about the library’s supply of free coronavirus tests, often asking medical questions library workers aren’t trained to answer. Patrons arrive in such large numbers to grab tests that the line sometimes backs up for blocks. And exhausted librarians also are getting sick with covid themselves.

“The library has always been a community center, a place where the public can get something they wouldn’t have otherwise, like free Internet,” another D.C. children’s librarian said. “But it feels like we’ve become too good at our jobs. It becomes, ‘Oh, the library can handle it.’ We’re getting more and more tasks and responsibilities that just feel overwhelming.”

COMMENT

While public libraries are an obvious location to distribute COVID tests, it's typical that nobody thought of sending over a few medical staff as well.  Librarians are in no way prepared to handle suddenly becoming a public health center.  yet where else is there?

Lots of People Want to Check Out this Library

 Kate Dwyer. "Lots of People Want to Check Out this Library", New York Times,  January 16, 2022, p. ST3. 

After Dr. Mackesy's death, a SWAT-team-like group of librarians and conseravtionists spent three weeks combing through his book-filled, 7,400-squre-foot house to select 35,000 volumes to add to the university's libraries. 

Surprise discoveries included an 18th century Rousseau text with charred covers (found in the kitchen), a "pristine" copy of a rare 1950s exphibition catalog showing Wassily Kandinsky's paintings, posters from the May 1968 protests when stuents in Paris occupies the Sorbonne, a hand-drawn Christmas card from the filmmaker John Waters and the orginial recordings of the thorists at that 1966 structuralism conference. 

"For years, everyone had said, 'There's got to be recordings of those lectures,'" said Liz Mengel, associate director of collections and acadmic serivices for the Sheridan Libraries at John Hopinks.  "Well, we finally foudnd the recordings of those lectures.  They were hidden in a cabinet behind a bookshelf behind a couch."  Several first editions by 20th-century poets and novelists sat on a shelf in the laundry room. 

After the librarians from Hopkins and nearby Loyola Notre Dame were finished selecting their donations, the remaining books were carted away by a dealer, so Dr. Macksey's son could prepare the house to be sold. 

COMMENT

When a professor who was known to be a book collector died, libraries got first crack at his collection which turned out to be a dragon's hoarde of hidden treasure.  It was especially generous of the heirs to let the librarians pick what they wanted since they could have just gone straight to the book dealers.  It was also perceptive of the librarians to take the offer since some librarians seem to think that it's not worth their time to accept and paruse the collections of retired or deceased faculty.   

Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000

 Lori Teresa Yearwood, "Being Homeless Cost Me $54,000", New York Times January 2, 2022, p. SR10.

By the beginning of 2015, I had become a woman forlornly clutching plastic garbage bags as she makes her way from food pantry to shelter to public library to park bench.  I had once been a writer who helped to cover the Dalai Lama's visit to Maiami.  I had traveled to Ireland to interview a famous self-help author.  By contrast, my homeless existance was limited to a two-mile radius.

...

He began appearing every morning at teh entrance of the shelter and he would follow me until I got to the public library.  One day he said he would give me a duffle bag to replace my garbae bags and told me I could keep some of my other belongings in a shtorage shed he owned.  When we arrived, he pushed me inside, where he sexually assaulted me. 

COMMENT

The library is a safe space, but also a dangerous space.  The predator follows a homeless woman to the library because he knows that's where she'll go, and makes a false offer of help to lure her into a bad situation.  Librarians are not social workers, and the library doesn't save this woman.  An actual social worker does that, taking her to lunch and helping her sort out impossible medical bills in order to help her get a place to live and resume working as a journalist.  

The Things I Would Never Do

Cailin Flanagin, "The Things I Would Never Do" Atlantic Dec 23, 2021 https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/12/cancer-teeth-loss/621103/ 

I came across Play It as It Lays in my high-school library when I was 16, and I cut two or possibly three classes to read it. God, I hated high school. I wanted to read, but they wanted me to sit at a desk and talk about “side, angle, side.” I found Joan Didion’s novel electric, bleak, ravishing. More than that: essential.

There I was, on the cusp of womanhood, of being a sexual creature—and in the nick of time, I had stumbled across this invaluable guidebook. In the girls’ magazines, all you ever read about was “boys who only wanted one thing” and how you should be grateful for strict parents, because imagine what would happen to you if they didn’t care enough to give you a curfew? But Play It as It Lays introduced me to what were obviously the real perils, the important ones that the adults were keeping from us. Bad, terrible, unspeakable things that I’d never even considered. Balling at parties! S-M! Yorkshire terriers!

I can remember whole passages from the book, but more than anything that series of she-would-nevers. Over the years, I have come up with my own list, ​​as square and tame as I am.

COMMENT

A work of fiction not only helps a teen shape her own adult identity, the experience of reading it has such a lasting impact that she uses it as the theme for an article  written many, many years later.  This narrative illustrates the long-term impacts of libraries.  Would Caitlin Flanagan have found Joan Didion if the school library didn't have it?

 

The Stranger I Become

 Katherine Coles, "The Stranger I Become: on Walking, Looking and Writing",  Turtle Point Press, 2021.

The author gratefully acknowledges the Emily Dickinson Archive, an open source website though which a number of libraries and institutions have made many of Dickinson's original handwritten poems and other materials available in facsimile for the use of scholars.  Having access to this material changed my relationship to and understanding of Dickinson's work.  [p.140]

COMMENT

There are many more articles about creating digital archives than a about using them, but I expect that this kind of acknowledgement to digitized archives will become increasingly common. 

A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives

 Jennifer Schuessler, "A 21st-Century Emily Dickinson Finds a Home in the Archives", New York Times, December 10, 2021. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/12/10/arts/television/emily-dickinson-archive-harvard.html

Now, a show that emerged from the archives is returning whence it came, for — as Dickinson might have put it — all Eternity.

The series, whose three-season run will come to an end on Dec. 24, is donating dozens of costumes, period furnishings and props to the Emily Dickinson Museum in Amherst, Mass., where they will be used to flesh out the sense of her daily life at the Dickinson homestead.

And in a twist, it is donating its production archive of scripts, costume and set designs, and paper props to Harvard University’s Houghton Library. Included in the haul: the show’s painstaking re-creations of Dickinson manuscripts, which will be housed alongside more than 1,000 of the Real Thing.

...

The donation to Harvard’s Houghton Library is the library’s first acquisition from a television show, according to Christine Jacobson, an assistant curator of modern books and manuscripts.

Jacobson first started following Smith on Twitter in 2018, after she got wind of the show when the production requested permission to reproduce a portrait owned by Harvard. They struck up a virtual friendship (bonding over a side passion for Russian literature), and last summer, when Smith asked if Houghton wanted materials from the show, she jumped.

 COMMENT

The show used archival materials for it's creation, and returns the fruits of that creative effort back to the library.   The library was able to aquire the materials due to a personal relationship between an astute librarian and the shows creators. 

Chloe Kim Is Grown Up and Ready for the Olympic Spotlight

 

John Branch, "Chloe Kim Is Grown Up and Ready for the Olympic Spotlight," New York Times, 

Kezia Dickson, a student from New York, vaguely knew who Kim was. She saw people stare at Kim in the dining hall. She heard them whisper, “Oh, my God, that’s Chloe Kim,” as Kim played pool.

Dickson sensed how uncomfortable it must be. She introduced herself and, at some point, mentioned that she was struggling in French, a language familiar to Kim.

“Chloe gave me her phone number and was like, ‘I really like chatting with you, and if you ever need help in French, just reach out to me,’” Dickson recalled. “I did, and she actually answered the phone. And then we went to the library and she tutored me for three hours. And she would do it every other week.”

COMMENT

The library offers study space that also serves as a place of refuge for an Olympic gold medalist to establish a friendship.